A seeming miracle happens by two refugee kids, flooding Galway with believers. Among them is a Californian con artist, hoping to start a new religion, and a serial arsonist. Jack is roped into finding the miracle kids by the Church but soon discovers that nothing about them is what they seem…
A Galway Epiphany is the first Ken Bruen novel I wasn’t totally taken with. Part of the problem is the lack of a strong villain - there’s no comparable baddie here to the likes of Silence and Jericho to make for a more compelling narrative - and the other part is that the book is made up of lots of odds and ends that stop and start abruptly without really adding up to anything satisfactory. Still, I didn’t dislike it and it has its moments here and there with quite a surprising ending - one of the most notable features of Bruen’s books is how well he ends them, compared to most writers, who tend to flub it.
A feature of Bruen’s Jack Taylor novels is constant mentions of news stories and pop culture recs, particularly novels. It feels like there’s an overabundance of that here with too much focus on news stories - particularly on Trump and his Brit counterpart BoJo - that makes Bruen sound like a tiresome, stereotypical boomer. And the numerous pop culture mentions added to the feeling that they were making up for a lack of substantial material in the story proper.
The rift between Jack and Keefer felt a bit forced. One scene in particular stood out as really strange - Jack gets upset that Keefer (probably) killed someone. I’ve only read three Jack Taylor novels so far but he’s definitely killed more than one person himself in that short space of time - why would he get bent out of shape by someone doing what he’s known for doing, vigilante justice?
Taylor also seems oddly… soft in this outing. All of the minor threats - and they are minor - in the story are dealt with without much involvement, often none, on his part. The one storyline where he does take action - the cyberbullying episode - sees him do little more than a bit of shouting and waving a knife around. This is a guy who used to get any number of firearms and take the fight to the enemy. It’s underwhelming stuff.
The good thing with having so many different story plates spinning at the same time is that it’s never boring and I read this almost as quickly as I did his other better novels with Galway in the title. The bad thing about that is that the various small story threads don’t really go anywhere and make the novel unmemorable overall.
Some of the narrative choices Bruen makes though are interesting. Like how he suddenly ends the arsonist storyline or builds up to what seems to be a climactic showdown at the farm only to take that in a completely unexpected, almost darkly comedic, direction. Maybe the most surprising is how he chose to end this book - not surprising in that it came out of the blue (it was foreshadowed quite a bit beforehand), but surprising in that he actually followed through with it.
I viewed the Jack Taylor series like any other long-running series where the author cranks out new books one after the other without any real intention of ending it, so it’s a bit of a shock that Bruen did what he did. He may have left the door open a little if he wanted to return but in a way I’m glad he did it that way because it’s so rare for that to happen in fiction and only adds to Bruen being a distinctive writer.
A Galway Epiphany is a long way from being among Ken Bruen’s better novels - none of the villains are that great, the storylines are half-baked, Jack himself feels out of sorts for most of it, and there’s little here to make for a memorable outing - but it’s also effortlessly compulsive reading, thanks to Bruen’s skilful writing in producing such a strong narrative voice in Jack Taylor. Fans of this writer/series won’t need any convincing to check this one out, but, if you’re a more casual reader of crime fiction or are thinking of sampling Bruen with this novel, definitely start elsewhere with the other Galway books instead.
No comments:
Post a Comment